The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                                      Ways to Reform
                                                                 The Challenge To The Church

Anyone who wilfully denied cardinal doctrines of the Catholic faith, and presisted in error, might be
burnt at the stake as a heretic. This was the punishment for society's worst enemy. People bringing
faggots to the heretic's fire were promised forty days of pardon from the otherworldly fires of purgatory. The burnings were terrible, but they were very rare: so they were meant to be, and had
been, at least during the century since the penalty of burning for heresy had been instituted in 1401,
and after heretics and rebels in Sir John Oldcastle's abortive rising of 1414 had attempted no less
than the dispossession of the Church and the capture of the King. As the darkest sins, heresy threatened to call down the vengeance of God not only on heretics but also upon the society which
harboured them. Long before, in the the reign the of King John, when England had fallen under the
papal interdict, it was said that the corn had failed and neither grass nor fruit would grow. If England
were ever cut off from Catholic Christendom again because of the will of a king, or if heretics became
too many to be cast out, natural disorder would return. In 1532 Sie Thomas More thought that that
time had come, and prophesied that God would withdraw His grace and let all run to ruin.

There were heretics within the community when Henry VII's reign began, but they were few and,
for the most part, hidden. The history of heresy is often inseparable from the history of persecution.
Heretical enclaves were discovered only when the authorities sought and found them; the nature of
their dissent revealed only in the light of the questions which the persecutors asked. Only the Church,
which had been disobeyed, could define what was heresy, judge and condemn it. The heretics who
were discovered were usually those who scandalized their neighbours and offended against the ethics
of the society in which they lived; those who held their heresies in private and lived obscure were
likely to remain safe, unknown to the persecutors and to posterity. No single and adamantine code
of heretical belief existed in England at the end of the middle ages. There were individual dissidents,
with beliefs so deviant that they alone held them. There were also distinct heretical communities of
men and women with their own creed, tradition, martyrs and code of behaviour; a sect which recognized itself as marked by special providences. To their enemies they were the Lollards; to
themselves, the 'privy' or 'known' men and women; known, that is, to themselves, but, they hoped,
not to others, for they kept their faith in secret, hiding from persecution.